Sinovation-developed LLM platform hits $1b valuation

Li, who also serves as CEO of 01.AI, told Bloomberg that the valuation was based on a funding round featuring Alibaba Group’s cloud services unit, among other investors. He added that 01.AI’s debut open-sourced, foundational LLM – Yi-34B – is available globally in Chinese and English, and it outperforms several leading established opensource models, such as Meta’s Llama 2, across certain metrics.

“01.AI is a bold but long-awaited endeavour for my pursuit of AI [artificial intelligence] over four decades,” Li added in a LinkedIn post.

Sinovation outlined its plans for a new platform at a forum in March, inviting individuals and companies with expertise in LLMs, natural language processing (NLP), multi-modality, and other “AI 2.0 related technologies” to join the initiative as employees or partners.

Li noted that, with the rise of large-scale data sets that could improve training models and better simulate human cognitive intelligence, AI had reached an inflection point. He characterised AI 1.0 as a neural network model that enabled machines to surpass humans in computer vision and NLP. Yet the cost of implementation – of collecting and labelling data – were prohibitive and scale was elusive.

AI 2.0 is underpinned by the ability to train LLMs using large datasets without manual annotation. Generative AI is the first application. AI 2.0 models can not only learn text and image data, but also information drawn from voice, video, automated hardware sensors data, and even DNA, Li said, and they can reach higher levels of cognitive intelligence with prediction, decision-making, and exploration.

He envisaged AI 2.0 moving beyond high-powered chat tools – the best-known LLM, Open AI’s GPT-4 framework, underpins ChatGPT – with full AI automation being applied across e-commerce, entertainment, search, the metaverse, finance, and medicine.

01.AI was unveiled in July. Li said that AI-powered LLMs represent a “historical opportunity” that China cannot afford to miss. Jie Ma, who previously served as head of metaverse operations at Baidu, joined Sinovation in May, when 01.AI was formally established. He is described as an investor in the project.

According to its website, Yi-34B has trained 34bn parameters from scratch and built a corpus of 3trn tokens. A second model, Yi-6B, has trained 6bn parameters.

In March, Baidu launched Ernie, its own LLM. On releasing version 4.0 last month, the company said that Ernie 4.0 and GPT-4 “claim to rival each other in terms of their capabilities and performance.” Ernie 4.0 has 10trn parameters to GPT-4’s 100trn, but it uses structured and unstructured data sources and claims to be more proficient in performing multi-modal tasks and to have better intelligence capabilities.

Baidu has created a CNY 1bn (USD 145m) fund that will focus on generative AI companies and encourage them to use Ernie.

However, some start-ups are working on LLMs of their own, to mixed effect. Huiwen Wang, co-founder of Meituan, established Light Year – a generative AI business to be benchmarked against OpenAI – earlier this year and raised secured Series A funding. In June, Wang stepped down, citing health problems, and Meituan agreed to acquire Light Year for USD 284.3m.

Baichuan AI, which was founded in April by Xiaochuan Wang, formerly CEO of search engine Sogou, secured USD 300m in a first tranche of Series A funding last month. Investors included Alibaba, Tencent Holdings, and Xiaomi. The start-up has developed several LLMs – four are opensource and have been released for free commercial use, while two are closed-source.

Sinovation was established in 2009 and claims around USD 3bn in assets under management across 10 funds, including US dollar and renminbi-denominated vehicles. The firm closed its debut US dollar growth fund on USD 600m in February, short of the USD 1bn target. The latest US dollar VC fund achieved a first close in April 2022 but was USD 200m short of a USD 500m target as of June.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
• Technology
• China
• Sinovation Ventures
• Alibaba Group
• artificial intelligence